Unhallowed Ground

by Kristen Gupton

  He sat up and peeked around the edge of the curtain, seeing Henry’s old pickup outside. Ryan had called the night before to tell him the parts were finally ready to be picked up for the machinery, and they would head out in the morning.

  Kelly glanced over at his cell phone lying on the coffee table, remembering that he’d not charged it. If Ryan had called to say he was on his way, it wouldn’t have come through.

  He got up and shuffled to the front door. Kelly pulled it open and waved at Ryan to come in. There was no way he was going all the way to Hays without putting on different clothes than he’d slept in.

  Ryan shut off the truck and jogged up to the front door, finding it left open for him.

  “Sorry if you called to wake my ass up,” Kelly said, walking down the short hall to his bedroom. “Phone’s dead. You got a charger in the truck?”

  Ryan went and dropped into the ratty old recliner in the living room. “Yeah. It sucks, but it works. You might have half a charge by the time we get to Hays.”

  “Good enough. Be out in a sec.”

  “No big. Dad said we can stay overnight. Gave me two hundred for us to blow,” Ryan replied.

  Kelly emerged after a quick shower. He had an old backpack slung over his shoulder stuffed with a change of clothes and his toothbrush.

  “Still with the backpack?” Ryan snorted, getting up. “We’re adults for God’s sake, Kel. Get a suitcase.”

  “It still works!” he replied, picking up his phone and wallet from the coffee table.

  “More like you’re just cheap.” He went to the front door and opened it.

  Kelly followed him out and locked the door. As they moved down the walkway toward the truck, he came to a stop, looking over the snow-covered lawn.

  Ryan pulled his keys out and turned around, noticing Kelly no longer following. “Come on, man. We’re never gonna get there.”

  Kelly shook his head and dropped his backpack to the walkway before stepping into the snow.

  There were footprints going right up to his living room window. Whoever had left them hadn’t been wearing any shoes.

  Ryan frowned and went back over. “What is it?”

  Kelly pointed at the tracks coming up from the sidewalk, across the lawn, to the window, and then back across the yard. “Someone was here.”

  “Someone with a wish for frostbite,” Ryan replied, crossing his arms over his chest. “No mysterious visitors knocking on your window last night?”

  Kelly shook his head. “If there was, I didn’t hear them. I’m still pretty sore, and I won’t lie, I tossed back three of those pain pills the doctor sent me home with.”

  “You weren’t out here stoned out of your mind wandering around naked, were you?” Ryan asked, laughing.

  Kelly placed his snow boot next to one of the footprints. “The dude who left these wouldn’t even fit in my shoes, Ryan.”

  He shook his head. “Weird. Probably just someone drunk. Don’t be getting all spooky on me again, okay? Let’s go to town and get our minds off this shit for today. We’ll get the parts, have a good lunch, catch a movie maybe.”

  “Yeah...” Kelly turned away from it and picked up his backpack. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They got in the truck, Kelly thankful to find a paper cup of coffee sitting in the cup holder for him. “You take such good care of me. What did I ever do to deserve a man like you?”

  Ryan cast a sidelong glance at him, pulling away from the curb. “More like it was an excuse to go see Dani. Madgie has made her life miserable since the night she wrecked her car. Dani goes to work, Madgie refuses to talk to her. She comes over to my house afterward, hasn’t been back to her own since it went down.”

  Kelly picked up his coffee and shook his head. “Poor girl. You guys know you’re welcome over at my place anytime, too. Dani’s just caught up in the middle of all this shit.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed and slouched down into the seat. “Hell, I even tried to see if she wanted to come with us, but despite Madgie’s crap, she’s got this sense of duty to keep going to work for the old witch.”

  Kelly looked out the window, not really having a response. While he liked Dani just fine, he was honestly glad she wasn’t coming along with them. While he generally had no problem being the third wheel, he wasn’t feeling up to it.

  “Don’t tell me you’re fixating on those footprints in your yard,” Ryan said, breaking the awkward silence.

  Kelly glanced over. “No, actually, I was thinking about Dani. If she wants to stay at my house tonight while we’re gone, I’d be cool with it. I know she gets along great with your parents and all, but she might want a little alone time given everything.”

  “That...that would be real nice of you, Kel,” he replied. “I’ll stop at the shop so you can run in and give her your keys if you want.”

  He forced up a smile and a nod. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

  Chapter

  38

  Dani looked up from the register after ringing out the previous customer. “Back again? Aren’t you guys on a mission for Henry?”

  Ryan shoved his hands in his pockets. “We were on our way out, but Kel wanted to ask you something.”

  She looked up at him and leaned forward. “What?”

  Kelly pulled his keys out of his pocket and held them out toward her. “Since we’re gonna be gone overnight, I was wondering if you wanted to house sit for me? Get a little bit of time to yourself.”

  She switched her gaze between the two of them, before reaching out and taking his keys. “Yeah, actually, that’d be really nice. Thank you, Kelly.”

  He saw movement and looked over her, spotting Madgie standing back in the kitchen, scowling at him. “It’s a mess, but...”

  “No, it’ll be great. It’s awkward being at Ryan’s house when he’s not around,” she said, tucking the keys into her pocket. “You guys will be back tomorrow night?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, following Kelly’s gaze and finding that he, too, was getting the death-glare from the old woman. “Anyway, have fun and we’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She leaned over the counter and got a quick kiss from Ryan as a small group of old men wandered through the doors. “Be careful, guys. Gotta get back at it, now. You don’t ever get between the old guys and their donuts.”

  They got back into the truck, and Ryan pulled out into the street, turning them toward the highway out of town. There was a brief silence, but Kelly finally turned in his seat to look at his friend.

  “What the hell was up with Madgie trying to kill us with her scowl?” he asked.

  Ryan kept his hands on the wheel and gave a shrug. “Dunno. She’s just whacked out over all of this. I mean, I get that Grace and William were her friends and all, and I’m sure their deaths have gotten to her, but I honestly think she’s blaming us.”

  Kelly frowned and looked out the windshield at the gray morning and the dead sorghum fields flanking the road. “That was my feeling, too.”

  “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it if that’s the case,” Ryan said. “Screw it, though. Like I said, we’re going to just get the parts then have some fun. All this stress and shit isn’t doing you any favors.”

  “That it is not,” Kelly agreed. He picked up his backpack from the floorboards and unzipped it, finding the bottle of pain pills he’d been given after his fall.

  Ryan glanced over. “Don’t be getting hooked on those things, now. That’s the last thing you need.”

  “I’m not. Actually, I think just some good old aspirin would be enough now. I just took them the last few nights to help me sleep.” Kelly rattled the bottle to see how many were left before shoving it back into his backpack and dropping it to the floorboard again.

  “Glovebox,” Ryan said. “Dad usually has something in there.”

  Kelly tugged open the small door before him and found a beaten up bottle of generic over-the-counter pain meds. He opened it, dumped two out into his hand then downed them
with a swig of coffee.

  Though Kelly tried to keep his mind off of the Suhrs and all that had happened, his brain refused to turn off. He slouched into his seat as they cruised down the highway toward the interstate.

  Ryan knew what was going on in his friend’s head well enough, but for the time being, there just didn’t seem to be much he could do about it.

  Despite it still being bitterly cold, the road was dry and ice-free. The trek to the interstate didn’t take too long since there wasn’t any farm equipment to deal with passing like in the spring and summer months.

  Once they hit I-70 and turned east, both Ryan and Kelly relaxed and broke into conversation again. Getting distance between them and whatever was going on back home was what they honestly needed.

  Chapter

  39

  Kelly smiled to himself when they passed the fairgrounds on the edge of Hays. “Finally.”

  “Need the little boys’ room?” Ryan asked.

  “Actually, yeah.” He smiled and straightened up in his seat.

  “Well, I’m sure the parts place will let you use theirs.” Ryan pointed ahead. “It’s just at the next exit.”

  “Yeah, south of the interstate,” Kelly said. “Isn’t my first parts run with you, remember?”

  He snorted and shook his head. “Needing to pee makes you downright crabby, you know that? You want me to stop on the exit ramp to let you have at it?”

  Kelly sunk down into the seat. “No!”

  “It’s good enough for the truck drivers!” Ryan laughed.

  “But they have an entire rig to hide behind. I don’t think this old pickup truck will leave all that much to the imagination for the passing traffic,” he said.

  “Traffic? Dude, we’re in Hays,” Ryan said. “It’s hardly like whipping it out in Kansas City.”

  “Just get us there, or I’m pissing in your coffee cup.”

  Ryan laughed and flicked on the blinker.

  Kelly glanced at the row of signs on the exit. There was one indicating the direction of the hospital and another pointing to the library.

  “Ryan?”

  “What?”

  “Would you mind dropping me off at the library while you go and grab the parts?” Kelly asked, nearly pressing his face against the window as he continued to stare at the sign.

  “You seriously have to go so bad you can’t make it half a mile to get there?” Ryan asked.

  Kelly turned back to face him and nodded with a little too much enthusiasm. “Yeah.”

  Ryan raised a brow but slowed down to pull in the driveway of the library. “I’ll wait for you, hurry up.”

  “I...might be a while. Go on and come back for me,” Kelly said, already opening the door.

  “Are you sick or something?” Ryan asked, slipping the truck into park.

  Though he didn’t want to get berated for it, Kelly cracked and turned around, keeping a hand on the truck’s door. “Okay, look... I just want to go in there and see if they have any of the old newspapers from Brayton. I mean, they probably don’t at this point, but it’s worth a shot.”

  “Kel, we’re supposed to be here to not think about that crap today,” Ryan protested.

  “I know, and it’s an outside shot, but...” Kelly gave a weak shrug, averting his gaze. “With all the old records back home destroyed in the fire, I’m really curious.”

  Ryan rolled his eyes, putting the truck back into gear. “All right, do whatcha gotta do. I’ll be back in a few. Once I pick you up, though, no more spooky stuff for the rest of the day, deal?”

  Kelly gave up a smile. “Deal.”

  He went into the library and looked around. He’d never been there before, and while it wasn’t a huge facility, he was still lost, libraries not being his natural environment.

  He wandered up to the librarian’s counter and waited for a few minutes before woman came to help him.

  “Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “Well, I hope so,” Kelly replied, glancing back over his shoulder. “Do you keep old newspapers here?”

  “We do,” she said with a nod. “Most of the major ones, in fact.”

  “This wouldn’t be a major one,” Kelly said, meeting her gaze. “I’m looking for old copies of the Brayton Brayer.”

  One of her penciled-on eyebrows rose. “I...I don’t know if we have those. We’ve only got a few of the old local papers, but we can certainly look.”

  Kelly thought back to the dates he’d seen on the headstones they’d moved. “I’m interested in anything from eighteen-ninety-two.”

  “Oh, wow.” She turned toward a computer terminal on the counter before her. “Let’s have a look. If we have anything, it’ll probably be on microfilm.”

  “Cool, thanks.” Kelly leaned forward on the counter, watching as she typed away for several moments, then clicking through a few assorted screens.

  “Well, I’ll be,” she said, looking up at him with a grin. “It looks like we do have some archived. I have to admit, I’ve never had someone even ask me to see the Brayton Brayer before. Let me go get it.”

  Pleased, Kelly turned around and looked out over the library again. The place was fairly vacant, being a weekday morning, and most of the town’s college students likely stuck to the library at the university.

  A few minutes later, the woman reappeared with a black cylinder in hand. She waved Kelly to follow her. Near the back of the library sat a bank of microfilm readers.

  She loaded the film for him and stepped back. “That roll has everything from eighteen-ninety-two on it. Luckily for you, that paper only came out once a week, so your search will be a lot easier than it otherwise might have been. If you’d been looking for the Kansas City Star, you’d have a mountain of it to dig through. Do you know how to use the machine?”

  Kelly eyed the size of the roll she’d loaded into the machine, pretty sure there was a mountain of stuff on it. Fifty-two issues, anyway. “I’ll admit I’ve never done this before.”

  “First time, eh?” she asked with a laugh.

  Kelly gave up an awkward laugh in return. He paid attention as she gave him a quick rundown of the microfilm reader and how to print off images of anything of interest.

  For half an hour, he scrolled through pages and printed off things he found of interest. He sat with his face painfully close to the screen, reading an old article from October of 1892.

  A pair of hands clapped down onto his shoulders, and Kelly damn near fell out of his chair with a yelp.

  Ryan stepped back and snorted, putting his finger to his lips. “Damn, Kel, it’s a library, keep it down.”

  Kelly got back into his seat and scowled up at his friend. “Ryan, you can’t go around scaring fat guys like that. One of these days, I’ll have a heart attack and you’ll be lonely.”

  Ryan dragged the chair from the vacant reader beside Kelly’s and landed next to him. “Well? Find anything?”

  “You sure you want to know?” he asked.

  He couldn’t help but notice the lack of humor in his friend’s response. “Please don’t tell me you found something that’s gonna make it hard to sleep tonight.”

  Kelly patted a stack of papers at his side that he’d printed off from a few of the images on the film. “Ryan, I knew there were some weird-ass things said to have gone on back home, but...”

  “Like what?” Ryan asked.

  Kelly shuffled through the papers before pulling one from the stack. “In April of eighteen-ninety-two, the preacher out at St. Francis pulled a publicity stunt to gain attention for his cult.”

  “What’d he do?”

  Kelly handed Ryan the paper. “Oh, he just had himself buried in the cemetery for three days before being dug up again.”

  “Well, I’d imagine it killed him,” Ryan said, looking over the paper.

  “Nope. They dug the son of a bitch up on the third day, and he was alive and kicking. He claimed it showed how much he was like Jesus.”

  Ryan frowned
and scanned over the article. “It had to have been a trick.”

  “Who knows, but it drew a crowd out to see him dug up the third day. I’d imagine most of the town was hoping it would kill him so the cult members would go away, but no such luck.” Kelly pointed back to the screen before him. “From that point on, there’s pretty much a story every week in the paper about weird shit going on in Brayton, all of it centered around the members of his congregation.”

  Ryan rolled closer to look at the screen. “Like?”

  “Like they started disappearing. At first, folks speculated that cult members were just getting disillusioned with it all and packing up in the night and moving away, but others eventually started to go missing, too.” Kelly reached up to press the print button to make a copy of the image he was viewing. “There were other accounts of people getting really violent and killing themselves.”

  Ryan shook his head and sat back in his chair. “Okay, so the old folks weren’t completely making it up, I guess. Though, this is the same era when they used to run stories about legitimate sightings of sea serpents and such. You gotta take it with a grain of salt.”

  “I don’t know.” Kelly pulled his final sheet from the printer and added it to his pile. “The preacher that was buried was the first to kill himself. Said he cut himself wide open with a scythe.”

  Ryan felt a sudden jolt run down his spine. “Really?”

  Kelly nodded and stood up, taking back the paper he’d handed Ryan earlier. “Yeah. So...you’re going to laugh at me, but I’ve got a theory.”

  “Shoot, let’s hear it.”

  “Okay, what if that preacher did bury himself, I mean like for real, and what if something underground got into him?” Kelly stopped at the counter and looked at the woman who’d shown him the machine. “All done. I printed off ten pages. What do I owe?”

  “Just a dollar,” she replied.

  Kelly dug a buck out of a pocket and handed it over before heading toward the door. “So, as I was saying...”

  Ryan opened the door for both of them. “Well...I mean, I would laugh but we’ve seen some shit in the past few days. Maybe?”